Despite Consumergeddon, it's still a mobile photosharing jungle out there. Unless of course you are Snapchat, in which case welcome to being the prettiest girl in the room. Which, while fun at times, still sucks — Because welcome to everyone being intimidated by you (as Facebook is with all heavily used communication apps) or accusing you of (warranted or unwarranted) salacious behavior or copying you or all of the above. So yeah.
This is my 7th opus on photosharing. Because I personally feel some strange affinity for it: It might be closest that an Internet business can function as a gateway to the mainstream. We <3 photosharing, because humans are very, very visual creatures and have been for about 200k years; In modernity the average time we spend watching TV is around 168 minutes per day which completely blows away our time spent on Facebook.
Seriously, we just have an insane impulse to look at, obsess over, the human likeness. It's crazy how irrationally obsessed we are with photos. For example, right now there is a photo I am dying to share but am holding off on and thinking about sharing constantly while simultaneously I'm clicking on photos of my married friends that I am jealous of and I'm also keeping tabs on a racy photo that is making the rounds via text amongst our friend group because of its incendiary nature. The latter photo was originally posted, and pulled, off of Facebook, but not before it amassed 100+ Likes. And all of this has taken up at least an hour of my time today.
We totally should have used Snapchat. 
But because photosharing is so endemic to human behavior, it's most easily overlooked when presented as a legitimate business, on multiple levels. The biggest exit to date in the space, Instagram, exited sans any meaningful revenue, adding even more resonance to the classic Silicon Valley joke, "A million guys walk in to a Silicon Valley bar. None of them buy anything. The bar is declared a rousing success."
But Instagram is important, just like Facebook was important and Myspace was important and Snapchat is now important. Listening to radio you increasingly hear the words "Check us out on Facebook and Instagram" versus "Check us out on Facebook and Twitter." If I were a Twitter Biz Dev guy I'd be shivering in my boots.
Instagram's traction, distilled into actual numbers, obviously concerned Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who made a ~$500m bid for Instagram before Facebook outbid it last April. Instagram made Facebook and Twitter look like legacy products — Because they were built on the web first and struggled with mobile.
Instagram is the camera brand of my/our/the iPhone generation, comparable to Nikon or Canon for my/our parents. It must be a huge pain point for Twitter that the "camera" used to upload a significant amount of photo content on its platform belongs to its competitor Facebook. And that it is now fighting a two pronged battle between competitor 1 and competitor 1A; Competitor 1A, Instagram, is the software; while competitor 1, Facebook, is now the storage piece/flash disk for all these photos.
This battle is specifically over high quality user-generated content, where brands at some point will ostensibly bid very highly for the opportunity to run humanized branding advertisements that they don't actually have to create . Twitter is actually making bank right now on this very principle, with $350m in revenue for 2012 and a run rate to hit $1 billion in 2013 we hear, so yeah it's a big deal.
Advertising against UGC will be the fulcrum of both Twitter's and Facebook's earnings statements in 2014 so everyone is stockpiling or making their bold moves a year ahead, before we all head off to vacation in Q4 2012. Instagram removed its Twitter Card integration. Twitter's weapons in the fight are press, its own product teams and its ability through Aviary to build its own Filters product. All of these aren't enough.
Don't even get me started on Flickr.
With independent developers on the Instagram ecosystem already earning over $1.5 million in revenue annually, today's Instagram TOS changes could mean at least 10x to 100x that if users don't become turned off at the app's attempt to derive value from the value it presently adds to users lives with its fancy filters. While $10m is meager, $100m in revenue seems just fine for Facebook, especially if it's mobile, especially when it's compared to the 1% of its value Facebook originally plunked down for Instagram.
And now I'm really curious about what Facebook offered Snapchat, assuming it did.
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